The bias is also clear in government spending priorities. Stephen Bush, the New Statesman’s political correspondent, pointed out in a July 2017 article that although the Conservative government has consistently spouted austerity rhetoric, the last two Tory chancellors have made an exception for road-building, on which both have spent lavishly.20 With living standards falling and Britain already having a fairly serviceable road infrastructure there is a whole host of areas that seem a potentially wiser investment, but somehow, both times, for both men, roads have seemed the obvious choice. Meanwhile, by 2014, 70% of councils had cut bus funding (the most feminised form of transport), with a £19 million cut in 2013 alone, and bus prices had been rising every year.21
British politicians are not alone here. A 2007 World Bank report revealed that 73% of World Bank transport funding is for roads and highways, most of them rural or linking up cities.22 Even where roads are the right investment choice, where the proposed road leads is not a gender-neutral decision. In an illustration of how important it is that development projects are based on sex-disaggregated data, another World Bank report recounted the disagreement over a proposed road in one village in Lesotho. Women wanted the road to be constructed in one direction to ‘facilitate their access to the nearest village with basic services’; men wanted it built in the opposite direction ‘to enable them to reach the larger town and market more easily on horseback’.23
The gender gap in travel data continues with the intentional omission in many transport surveys of shorter pedestrian and other ‘non-motorised’ trips.24 These trips, says Sánchez de Madariaga, are ‘not considered to be relevant for infrastructure policymaking’. Given women generally walk further and for longer than men (in part because of their care-giving responsibilities; in part because women tend to be poorer), this marginalisation of non-motorised travel inevitably affects them more. Ignoring shorter walking trips also adds to the gap in trip-chaining data, as this kind of travel usually involves at least one journey on foot. In short, the assumption that shorter walking trips are irrelevant to infrastructure policy is little short of an assumption that women are irrelevant to infrastructure policy.
But they aren’t. Men tend to travel on their own, but women travel encumbered – by shopping, by buggies, by children or elderly relatives they are caring for.25 A 2015 survey on travel in London found that women are ‘significantly less likely than men to be satisfied with the streets and pavements after their last journey by foot’, perhaps reflecting the reality that not only are women more likely to walk than men but also that women are more likely to be pushing prams and therefore be more affected by inadequate walkways.26 Rough, narrow and cracked pavements littered with ill-placed street furniture combine with narrow and steep steps at numerous transit locations to make travelling around a city with a buggy ‘extremely difficult’, says Sánchez de Madariaga, who estimates that it can take up to four times as long. ‘So what do young women with small kids do?’
Valuing cars over pedestrians is not inevitable. In Vienna 60% of all journeys are made on foot, in no small part because the city takes gender planning seriously. Since the 1990s Vienna’s head of gender planning, Eva Kail, has been collecting data on pedestrian travel and has installed the following improvements: improved and signed crossing locations (plus forty additional crossings); retrofitted steps with ramps for prams and bikes; widened 1,000 metres of pavement; and increased pedestrian street lighting.27
The mayor of Barcelona, Ada Callou, has shown similar determination to give her city back to pedestrians, creating what are called superilles or ‘superblocks’ – squared-off sections of the city with low speed limits open only to local traffic, with roads where pedestrians have equal priority with cars. Another example of easy changes that can be implemented to accommodate female travel patterns comes via London, where in 2016 the ‘hopper fare’ was introduced to the bus network.28 Previously, every time a user boarded a bus they were charged for a new journey, but under the new system users can now make two trips in one hour for the price of one. This change is particularly helpful for women because they were disproportionately penalised by the old charging system. This is not only because of women being more likely to trip-chain, but also because women make up the majority (57%) of London’s bus users (partly because it’s cheaper, partly because the bus is perceived as more child-friendly), and are more likely to have to transfer (which under the old system counted as a new trip).
The reason women are more likely to have to transfer is because, like most cities around the world, London’s public transport system is radial.29 What this means is that a single ‘downtown’ area has been identified and the majority of routes lead there. There will be some circular routes, concentrated in the centre. The whole thing looks rather like a spider’s web, and it is incredibly useful for commuters, who just want to get in and out of the centre of town. It is, however, less useful for everything else. And this useful/not so useful binary falls rather neatly onto the male/female binary.
But while solutions like London’s hopper fare are an improvement, they are by no means standard practice worldwide. In the US, while some cities have abandoned charging for transfers (LA stopped doing this in 2014), others are sticking with it.30
